


Maybe, everyone's interested

by fineandwittie



Series: And I'll call you by mine [2]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: A short scene from the book, Jealousy, M/M, Oliver's POV, Rewrite, bookverse, sort of pairs with the scene in the backseat of the car
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 07:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13609017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fineandwittie/pseuds/fineandwittie
Summary: Oliver just wanted Elio to shut up about Chiara.





	Maybe, everyone's interested

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd as usual.

Something had changed, the morning Elio bragged carelessly about his near-miss with Marzia. Or…no. Perhaps it had been the following day. The world, our tiny world in the Italian countryside, pivoted, just slightly, on its axis. The shift left me reeling, unable to find my footing. The constant of my first weeks at the villa, Elio’s staring, had suddenly vanished.

No matter how often I glanced his way over those next few days, he was never looking at me. It wasn’t that he was suddenly better at masking it, because he hadn’t been trying to mask it before. It was as though, instead, he’d simply lost interest, in me, in whatever it was about me that had intrigued him. He’d taken the measure of my soul, found all my weaknesses, and finally discarded me like a toy, broken and useless. Merely waiting for the scrap heap.

Yet, for all that he no longer stared, he did not stop speaking to me. He didn’t ignore me or treat me poorly. I felt the loss of the stare more than I would have his actual companionship because it was not his eyes on me that I no longer possessed, but whatever little part of him that had been interested. I had lost something I never truly possessed, but its potential, the thousand possible futures that his interest might have had, melted away in an instant.

It didn’t help the crushed glass feeling in my chest to listen to him talk about Chiara. 

He’d clearly moved on from Marzia. Perhaps they’d finally slept together. Maybe he’d discarded her as he’d discarded me. I would pity her, sympathize with her, but for the fact that she’d had him and I never had. Her broken heart meant nothing to me. Elio had touched her, had run hands and tongue and cock over her skin and put them all inside her. I envied her and I hated her. When she dropped by the house in the afternoons, I did not look at her without my sunglasses on because I knew I wouldn’t be able to soften my eyes.

So Elio seemed finished with Marzia, at least for the moment. And he had moved on, with gusto, to Chiara. Her hair, her eyes, her breasts, her ass, her mouth. The only thing he didn’t openly compliment about her was her cunt. I could not tell if it was a nod to decorum or if even he would not be that vulgar. 

But his comments about Chiara were always pointed. Some underlying thing hiding in his tone. He’d always look at me when he said them, as though gauging my opinion on the matter. As though my opinion on anything at all mattered to him. As though there was anything I could tell him that he didn’t already know. 

Finally, in the garden on morning, I snapped. I was sick to my bones of hearing him discuss Chiara, other girls, boys, anyone at all. All I could think about, all I could focus on, was the lack, the one person he never discussed: me.

“I’m not interested.” I wanted him to shut up. I wanted him to play me a song on the piano. I wanted to push him to the grass near the pool, strip off his trunks, and take him into my mouth.

“Everyone’s interested.” His voice sounded incredulous. As though the idea of anyone not wanting Chiara was unfathomable. I _wanted_ to grind her bones to dust and scatter her to the wind so I never had to think about him in her bed again. 

“Well, maybe. Not me.” My voice sounded, even to my own ears, agitated and overblown. 

I was somehow overreacting merely by trying to get him to stop talking. I couldn’t look at him. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the tiles of the pool.

“But I saw you two.” He sounded confused, accusatory, _invested_. 

I opened my eyes again. There was something not right about his voice or the cut of his gaze, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I looked back at him, trying to keep my gaze steady and unflinching. “What you saw was not your business to see. Anyway, I’m not playing this game with either her or you.”

And play games she did. Chiara had been after me nearly since I arrived. I hear the echo of her _I’d’a gave you a bettah price too_ and wondered, not for the first time, if she’d realized what it seemed she was offering. Likely not.

She’d said it in front of Elio. Most of the things she said that were provocative were in front of Elio. She’d kissed me once, in front of Elio. So, no. I would not play this game where she uses me to make Elio jealous and he tries to figure out how invested I am in her. I would not be there go-between. I refused to allow them to make me their necessary accomplice. I didn’t want to have to witness him with her and know that I’d never even had a chance against Chiara’s full breasts or Marzia’s rounded ass. 

It hurt. The idea of it. All of it. That Elio knew how much I wanted him, how desperately I loved him, that he’d seen it all with his magnetic gaze and still spoke of lust, of Chiara, of Marzia, and once of Matteo, just in passing. Each word struck me like the sharpest razor. A cut so perfect you can’t feel it until your skin shifts and the edges of it part and gush, until you are dizzy from a wound you never knew you had and bleeding out on the floor.

I watched him as he blinked back at me. His cheeks, sharp with shadows, pinked faintly. He shrugged, as though to dismiss the entire conversation. “Look. I’m sorry,” he said and dropped his attention back to his books.

Now that it was gone from me, I craved it again. As always. And so, even though I had wanted nothing more than to end the conversation, had longed desperately to shut him up, I said, “Maybe, you should try.”

There was still something not quite right here, I told myself. His looks cut sideways too fast or his tone of voice a shade to neutral to reveal genuine desire. That was why I pursued the topic. And even though, I knew it was the stupidest thing in the world, I couldn’t help the tiny prick of hope that appeared in my chest. Was he playing a different sort of game?

“She wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.” He said it nonchalantly, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Would you want her to?” I narrowed my eyes at him, watching his reactions.

“No?” It was more question than answer, as though he wasn’t sure how I wanted him to answer and was hazarding what he thought the option most likely to be correct. But was it true? Or was the answer ‘yes’? Neither? Both? I couldn’t tell.

“Are you sure?” I couldn’t stop pushing. I wanted something genuine. I needed him to tell me the truth. To stop playing whatever game this was.

“What would you know?” He looked up at me, eyes narrowed and cold. I surpassed a flinch. I hadn’t seen that look in his face since the last time I’d said _later_ while in his company.

“I know you like her,” I pointed out, hoping to appease him.

“You have no idea what I like,” he snapped, sharply. It was hostile. Was what Elio wanted, then, to be unknowable? Was that why he spent so much time with me in silence? Why he hid behind the knowledge or talent or structure of others, playing Busoni or Liszt or Bach, but never himself? 

I turned away from him, back to my work, so he would not see what I knew my eyes did not hide. I’d never heard an original composition of his, I realized in that moment. Only transcriptions or altered versions of others’ work. The realization pressed in on me, eating up the air in my lungs until I thought I might be gasping. I ached with it.

I never, for a moment, believed that he did not compose pieces of his own. I imagined that he’d written an entire symphony to Chiara’s body or Marzia’s or Matteo’s. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to hear the music he’d written to Marzia’s body as he’d taken her. I wanted to be able to experience his own experience of sex. Since I’d never have his body, his virginity, or his heart, I wanted his mind. 

But, I would never have that either.


End file.
